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To: Eric L who wrote (4487)	4/29/2000 2:41:00 PM
From: tero kuittinen	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 34857

The decision about not using GSM-900 was forced on US operators... that was the crucial point where things went wrong. The GSM-1800 market is an expansion of GSM-900, so the original decision to not implement GSM-900 in America was where it all started. Of course, there is a good reason why GSM-900 never made it to America. The US military is using the 900 frequency or something - it's hard to say how costly it would have been to free that chunk of spectrum for commercial use. So let's just say this key decision was forced on the operators; they had no say on the topic. I don't know whether it would have been economically feasible to make sure that GSM-900 can launch in USA. But the ultimate cost of that decision turned out to be higher than anyone could have dreamed. Since the US version of GSM, GSM-1900, turned into a niche standard, it never became a priority for American network vendors. And since GSM-900 was never implemented in USA, Motorola and Nortel never really got the hang of it. As a result, Motorola lost its edge in the global mobile network market - and Nortel and Lucent lost their handset divisions. You can argue that this was bound to happen anyway, but I doubt that. I think that Nokia and Ericsson ended up where they are now because it's so hard to develop technology that does not exist in your own continent. Their current market shares can be directly traced into the decision made by the US government. I'm not complaining, Eric. Nokia was handed its current business on a silver platter - it was developing GSM-900 at the heart of the early subscriber base of this standard. I'm sure you're right about GSM never having a realistic shot at becoming the one mandated standard in USA. It doesn't really matter now, I guess. But some other decisions - like Nextel's adoption of iDen - just seem incomprehensible to me. US marketplace was already fragmenting... so hey - let's screw with it some more! That original decision started a chain reaction that is still continuing. Lack of GSM-900 success turned into a lack of GPRS clout for Motorola and Nortel. Lack of GPRS strength is turning into a problem in getting W-CDMA orders. And so on, and so on. In the end, the absence of GSM-900 in USA will translate into literally tens of billions of dollars of lost sales for North American vendors. No matter whether the decision was inevitable or not - it's one of the costliest standardization decisions ever made. Japan has now a chance of undoing the mistake of implementing PDC in the first place. I'm not sure how USA can get out of its current isolation. The bottom line about a standard competition: it only works if users can change their decisions. The US operators can't do that. They are locked into the fiefdoms of GSM-1900, TDMA, CDMA and iDen - forever and ever. So the competition model doesn't work here. It doesn't lead to one standard triumphing over others, because the investment made in the networks is so gigantic. Ameritech is the last US operator to switch standards - from now on, it will be too costly. Tero

To: Eric L who wrote (4487)	5/1/2000 1:01:00 PM
From: Puck	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

PrimeCo management originally wanted to use GSM but their board of directors overruled in favor of CDMA. At the time (three and a half years ago, I think), PrimeCo's CEO said that CDMA had not lived up to any of QCOM's promises of being thirty or forty and then five to ten times more efficient than GSM. His analysis based on field tests corroborated Ericsson's conclusion that CDMA was only 1 to 1.5 times as efficient as CDMA and that GSM was the obvious choice given its decade long seasoning commercially in Europe and elsewhere. In protest he resigned and became president of Omnipoint, a GSM provider on the east coast, which has been doing very well during the past year.